has instructed. She smokes an extra-long Marlboro Light. My mother wrestles Gummidge into a cat carrier at the back of the house, loads her into the silver station wagon, and pulls up.
When my father, a lanky man with a few wisps of black hair remaining on his mostly bare head, arrives home, no one else is there. He is coming from the grocery store that he manages. He places a carton of milk, a package of sliced turkey breast, and a bag of apples into the refrigerator and exhaustedly sits down at the kitchen table, amidst a sea of the last two weeks’ newspapers. He begins idly reading one of them through his square-framed glasses. He remains there for thirty minutes before my mother and Carol burst through the door, cat carrier in hand.
“Roxy has an announcement to make!” my mother shouts.
“Who’s Roxy?” my father asks.
“Roxy is a cat,” she informs him.
“You got another cat?” he asks, his expression moving from puzzled to perturbed.
“Yes,” my mother says, proudly.
“Jesus,” he says.
“Would you like to meet her?” she asks.
“S’pose so,” he answers. My mother opens the wire door and a calico scampers out. “That’s Mrs. Gummidge!” my father exclaims.
“It was determined today, by the veterinarian, that the-cat-known-as-Mrs. Gummidge was not eight years of age, as previously imagined, but is, in fact, a sprightly one year old. It was also determined, at the veterinarian’s, that the-cat-known-as-Mrs. Gummidge had a nasty sliver lodged in her side, causing her to cry and act generally like a curmudgeon. As this cat’s age has been clarified, and her troubles assuaged, she wishes to put forth a new image, and asks, now, to be known only as Roxy!”
“Roxy is moving out of her cell and into my house!” Carol announces. She had once toyed out loud with the idea of adopting Mrs. Gummidge, remarking that two sad women might make one another happy. The way two rawngs make a rah-at. Now that Roxy has appeared, she seems to have revised her logic: a happy cat might cheer her up. She places Roxy in the passenger seat of her car and lights a cigarette. The two drive coolly away.
At 9:30 p.m., my father retreats to bed, as he always does. Soon thereafter, Cleopatra rises languorously from a living room nest and saunters up to join my father in the king-sized bed. As always, my mother remains in the kitchen, indefinitely, reading mystery novels and sipping flavored decaf, well into the deep sleep of Cleopatra and my father.
My mother sets her book aside and creeps out to revel in the new space of the pantry—the erstwhile home of a cat who suddenly switched lives and names. New discoveries have thrown the cat’s former persona into a liminal zone between past reality and fiction. Who lived here? My mother asks herself. Who was this “Mrs. Gummidge”?
Mrs. Gummidge was a being with several names and a being with no name. She was a Z-word that was hard to remember, with a face rendered gray by a limited and artful memory. My mother swoops up the bag of Whiskas, nearly empty now at the end of the day. She shakes it like a gigantic maraca, humming a syncopated version of “Cuddle Cats.” Drawn by the sound of food—or perhaps by the Latin rhythm—Don Diego appears at her feet. My mother does not finish the song, but pours all the rhythm, the remaining morsels of Whiskas, into a Blue Willow bowl.
My mother turns, and begins to walk to bed. Mounting the stairs, she pauses, thinking that she hears the distant cry of a lost, hungry feline. She continues on her way. The stairs are loud and creaky and she barely hears the rustling of her spirit, down there again tonight, shifting beneath them.
THE ORPHAN BIRD
Last night over the phone, my mother informed me that she has a brain aneurysm and will undergo brain surgery in several months. Today I am at my office job.
I work at Bumble and Maw, a classical music publishing company whose main office is in London. I am positioned in The Rental Library, which is the bottom of the caste system. I refer to the staff in our department as “The Rentally Ill.”
Patti is our boss. She is an opera singer. There is a hole under Patti’s desk. Not just a hole in the flat green carpet but a hole in the floor itself, surrounded by a mound of concrete and debris. There is a pipe in the hole and it intermittently spews steam, which rises up above Patti’s desk, through the dying leaves of a weeping fig. Patti is constantly announcing that she is “putting out fires,” which generally means “dealing with the demands of cranky customers.” This is a phrase drawn from standard office lexicon. But the steam over her desk looks like smoke and illustrates Patti’s fire in a way, metaphorizing it as one that will never be put out.
Today Patti is slightly more centered than usual because she has brought in one of her birds. Last week she brought in Newton, an African gray who knows various barnyard animal noises and occasionally sings the Queen of the Night aria. When Patti went upstairs for a meeting she left him in her office. For two hours he made the sound of a bomb being dropped, often punctuating the whistling descent with a sotto voce “boom!”
Occasionally he moved into “Pop Goes the Weasel.”
Today Patti has brought in Cully, a forty-year-old parrot who was recently made an orphan when her owner, an elderly woman on the Upper East Side, passed away.
Patti sets Cully’s little cage atop a file cabinet and says, “OK, everyone. I’m going for a meeting at the Met Opera Library. I should be back around four o’clock.”
We all nod or grunt slightly. “I should be singing at the goddamned Met,” she mutters as she exits.
For the next two hours I sit next to the phone and do not answer it. I have learned that there is, invariably, a clueless and panicked orchestra librarian on the other end trying to place a last-minute order. Each of the six thousand customers acts as though he or she is the only one.
I listen to the messages they leave me:
BEEP!
“Oh hi! This is Lisa from you-know-where,” comes an apologetic and manic squeak. “I need to rent the Ravel Bolero … again. Hoping to have the parts airmailed so they get here by morning. Also hoping you can waive the two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar rush fee. Our orchestra is really struggling here. I’m sure you understand! Give me a call as SOON as HUMANLY possible! You have the number!”
BEEP!
“Heeellloooo. This. Is. William. Moore. That’s MOORE … Not more, as in “greater quantity.” Not Moor as in “Muslim,” or moor as in “area of wasteland with poor drainage,” but MOORE. That’s Emmmm. Ohh. Ohh. Ar. Eee! As in Marianne Moore. The poet. If you don’t know who that is, well, I should advise that you learn.
“Pressing on!
“I do not want to rent any music. But I am in need of some information that I’m hoping you can provide. It concerns the Ravel Piano Concerto in G and a certain eighth note, which is marked as a sharp, and which I believe should be marked as a flat!
I am hoping to compare notes with you—no pun intended—and see if we can’t get to the bottom of this!”
BEEP!
